pvidler

Yes, but you do generally need a case anyway -- modern glass screens are reasonably sturdy, but they can be broken.

The surface has a case that doubles as a keyboard, but if you need the kickstand without a keyboard you have to remove it entirely (or so it seemed from the keynote). That's a pain -- it's one of my most common uses of the iPad with smart cover.

Based on the end of the post, they might well have 'won', given the special mention in the article.

"P.S. There might, in fact, be more than five primes out there. There might, after all, have been special shipments to rogue recipients. You never know…"

> The landing page looks nice, but it really doesn't tell me anything about the product.

Agreed. I'd never heard of Greplin or Cue and all I got from this site was 'just some sort of calendar app'. Still don't know what either one actually does.

That's just battery life... wait until we see what the heat will be like! Seriously, even my Macbook Air gets hot under mild load -- the only reason I tolerate it is because it sits on a desk.

Fans and vents on a tablet... I just can't see that catching on for many people. The ARM model is more promising, but this competes much more closely with the iPad.

Also, the video was very funny with the pen input -- his palm interferes with the initial demo and 20 seconds later he's talking about their amazing palm rejection technology. Don't even get me started on the fact that none of the presenters seemed able to get the swipe-in-from-the-side gesture to work on the first try.

> but I think they should do it more vigorously and reject every single shitty app, and ban those developers

Easy to say, but hard to do with the volume of app submissions. That's the trouble with a large-scale process that must be carried out by humans -- consistency and fairness are just plain hard.

This example is a clear sign that there's room for significant improvement, however.

I hate excel. For some reason, it has become the standard for creating any grid-based documents, even though the table support in word would often be far superior when equations aren't needed.

I hate the lack of smooth scrolling, especially when you have differing cell heights. I hate the lack of cell padding, leading to manually sizing every row.

Most of all, I hate the total lack of focus. What sort of document is it aimed at creating, these days? The answer is certainly not what is was 10–15 years ago, but the basic interface hasn't changed much (ribbon aside).

Agreed. One of the first things you learn as a parent is that all children are different and not all the advice that gets heaped on you will work. (Though the advice givers are usually certain that it will).

In fact, the constant advice and even "you're doing it wrong" comments are one of the more frustrating parts of being a parent. I was quite disturbed when my friends started having children and I found myself trying to give them advice -- I now force myself to just keep quiet most of the time.

> the way they hold their value even after a couple of years is simply awesome.

Agreed -- I just sold my 2007 MBP and got enough back to buy a new iPad (retina version). That's more money than most brand new low-end Windows laptops go for (are there any non-low-end Windows laptops? I looked but couldn't find much from the major stores).

If you think about the original price that I paid (£1100) minus the sale price (£400), the total cost is really not that bad...

> Most programmers will not need to write code in C. But they'll still be better and more versatile programmers if they know the language.

I agree, although I'm not sure C should be the top priority for someone that will never need to actually use it. There are lots of other things to learn and nowhere near enough time to learn them all.

Although learning C when you already know other languages is not particularly difficult.

Accuracy is not the issue -- the jot pro stylus seems very accurate to me. The real problem is lag, which so far prevents me from doing any handwriting on the tablet.

From what I can tell, lag is an issue for all the tablets right now?

The difference is that Windows 8 is an upgrade that will replace older versions entirely. Apple's users who didn't like iOS could stick with Mac OS X, but getting back to old-style Windows from Metro looks tricky (if it can be fully achieved at all). The Classic to OS X transition is a much closer match, except that Apple didn't really attempt to change the way you interacted with the computer at that time (it was/is still basically a WIMP interface).

That's not to say that Microsoft will fail, or that Metro will be worse than the Windows 7 GUI. It's certainly going to be more interesting than the average OS launch, but my gut feeling is that the reaction to this will match the reaction to the Office ribbon.

ICs have their hardware 'configuration' effectively in the metal layers, which are not so susceptible. The configuration is the biggest concern, as this is essentially the processor (or whatever the circuit is) itself. RAM used by a processor is also at risk, but this is easier to handle. From what I'm told, a reasonably large feature size ASIC can have far fewer problems than a modern FPGA.

Also, note that the Spartan 3AN does not seem to use flash for configuration. It looks like the internal flash is just for storage and the configuration is copied into RAM, as with normal Spartan devices. This means one less chip on the board and potentially better security, but no real advantage for avoiding SEUs.

Can you offer proof that those are both false? The China claim I grant you — especially as the actual claim was 99% (I somehow missed this in my initial reading).

The stuxnet thing is trickier. To make use of this remotely you (or a stuxnet style virus) would need access to a JTAG connection. These come in many forms, including USB (needing access to the host computer — like stuxnet) or Ethernet (needing access to the network). It seems a bit unrealistic because JTAG tends to be used for development, but field-reconfiguration is one of the advantages of FPGAs.

Of course, I believe this specific Actel FPGA uses flash for configuration, which makes updating it in the field somewhat inconvenient and therefore less likely to be used in practice. I remember hearing that this is why NASA switched to Xilinx, as they now require field reconfigurability.

Still, the article certainly wasn't 'bogus', and the new article claiming so contained far more errors. Especially when you read the actual paper and not just the linked press release.

Except that it wasn't a lie, as the original article didn't make these claims. Only the HN headline -- which wasn't in the original article -- and this new article contain sensationalised claims ('bogus story', for example).

You could argue that the original was worded to be deliberately confusing, perhaps even implying that the claims were proven, but I certainly didn't find it that way when I read it.

Actel devices are often used because they use flash memory for the configuration, which makes them usable in situations where RAM may be untrustworthy for something so important (e.g. where you can get bit-flipping due to ionising radiation).

They also make properly rad-hard FPGAs, although these are ridiculously expensive (I've heard that if you are looking at building more than ~10-15 units, an ASIC may actually be cheaper).

Edit: I should add that you could still use Xilinx and Altera devices in these situations, but you really need some way of mitigating the problem -- such as TMR memory.

Yes, I missed it too. I should probably read the verge more often, but their site design is just too beautiful to miss by putting it in my RSS reader. Ironically, the result is that I hardly ever remember to go there.

A little off-topic, but I'm curious: which apps are yours?

It's true that the websites would have driven most of the sales, but still interesting that the response was better than when Apple featured the app (which is also a big deal). I suspect the one-day-only nature of the sale might have helped quite a bit.

Thing is, the .com.au version worked fine in Safari this morning, but the .co.uk version tells me I need a more modern browser this afternoon.

So it's not just being limited to browsers that are technically capable of running it.

Europe does use the metric system, it's presumably the developer that doesn't (in terms of countries, just the US and sometimes the UK?). Really, supporting metric and imperial should be trivial — minutes rather than hours.

The issue I see is that you aren't going to get publicity like this twice. "We now support metric" isn't news that will show up on my radar in the same way that this announcement did; how many will bookmark this and check back later, if it doesn't work for them now?

From the link:

"Photoshop is required to use CSS Hat."

From their main site:

"CSS Piffle. No more photo editing software for web design!"

Eating their own dog food?

Looking at the front page, I didn't really experience the problems you describe. I had just two issues:

1) The photos of the candy should really near the top and visible without scrolling -- 'candy' is not a term I come across often, so I wasn't completely certain what was being sold. Perhaps I'm unusual, but I don't bother with videos unless the product has already interested me.

2) My eyes skipped past the price completely. I was actually about to write here that they left it out, finally spotting it only when I went looking.

...the green pay button was fine for me -- not particularly ugly or dodgy looking.

That's interesting, but in viewing the presentation the text is almost unreadable in Safari -- too much space between some letters, while others overlap.

If it works in Chrome, Firefox and IE... what's Safari doing wrong here? Oddly I just checked it on the iPhone and it seems fine there (although zooming out seems to be blocked, so the presentation is much too large for the screen).

iTunes has user ratings and reviews, although they seem to be read-only on the Apple TV (I believe you need iTunes to write your own). You can't sort by user rating, which is also a problem in the app stores.

Netflix on the Apple TV has genre listings — I believe Apple designed the interface, so it may be a little different from other versions.

They also use less space (depth -- imagine a MacBook air with an old-style keyboard), probably weigh less and are much easier to keep clean.

I prefer them for that last point alone. Non-chiclet keyboards get filthy and are a nightmare to fully clean.

It doesn't seem to work in Safari with click2flash, either. Possibly because click2flash doesn't actually disable flash, it just requires a click -- but there's nothing to click on.